By Will Dunham
VAL Kilmer, who starred in films such as Top Gun, The Doors, and Batman Forever while earning a reputation as a Hollywood bad boy, has died at age 65.
The cause of death was pneumonia, The New York Times reported last week, quoting his daughter Mercedes Kilmer.
The California-born, Juilliard-trained actor was one of Hollywood’s most prominent leading men in the 1990s before numerous spats with directors and co-stars and a series of flops dented his career.
Over the years, Kilmer gained a reputation as temperamental, intense, a perfectionist and sometimes egotistical.
“When certain people criticise me for being demanding, I think that’s a cover for something they didn’t do well. I think they’re trying to protect themselves,” Kilmer told the Orange County Register newspaper in 2003.
“I believe I’m challenging, not demanding, and I make no apologies for that.”
He made his film debut in the spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) before appearing in the goofy comedy Real Genius (1985).
He then rocketed to fame as Tom Cruise’s co-star in the smash 1986 hit Top Gun (1986), playing naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky.
Kilmer starred in director Ron Howard’s fantasy Willow (1988) and married his British co-star Joanne Whalley, with whom he had two children before divorcing.
One of his most challenging roles came in director Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) in which he played Jim Morrison, the charismatic and ultimately doomed lead singer of the influential rock band The Doors.
To persuade Stone to cast him, Kilmer put together an eight-minute video of himself singing and looking like Morrison at various points in his life. Kilmer’s own singing voice is used in the film.
The Doors ushered in the highest-profile years of his career.
In 1995 he succeeded Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader in Batman Forever, the third instalment in the Batman series.
